Decius wrote:

If only you could A) land a space shuttle on the moon,

See Nasa's most recent announcements.

B) extract the helium in that quantity

AFAIK this is easy.

C) PRODUCE NUCLEAR FUSION

See ITER.

D) sell the public on said NUCLEAR FUSION

That appears to be the sticky part, but fortunately its going to be about 15 years before we really need to worry about that.

OMG the tree-huggers are going to go NUTZ - and there's no friggin' trees on the moon that's the ironic part.

I think this is an idea that definetly needs to be studied some more. I mean, it's entirely possible for ***us*** (not you guys as "k" puts it - is he not American?) to accomplish this.

I mean, shit - we are the ones to landed humans on the moon, harnessed the power of the sun (fission/fusion), invented cell phones, regular phones, airplanes, cars, computers, silicon, air conditioning, pace makers, pacman, bread with no crust, etc.

RE: US: UW scientists want to mine moon energy | EnergyBulletin.net | Energy and Peak Oil News